Jung and the shamanic wounded healer: implications for psychotherapists
The emotional impact of client material on psychotherapists is an experience which dogs many practitioners. Jung refers to such experiences as psychic infections, connecting them to the old idea of the demon of sickness whereby a sufferer can transmit his disease to a healthy person whose powers then subdue the demon. All this is reminiscent of a shamanic way of working. In the Jungian tradition, not only is the shaman seen as the archetypal wounded healer par excellence because they turn states of derangement into a self-cure but only those who work in a shamanic way are considered true Jungians.
Little is written, however, to specify the zone of wounding which underpins these most effective psychotherapists. By utilising contemporary neuroscience approaches to archetype theory, this paper examines the ethnographic research evidence on Siberian shamanism thereby forging an entirely new approach to the wounded healer phenomenon by proposing a contemporary model for the specific psychological construction of healers based on shamanic initiation. The evidence suggests that the shamanic wounded healer arises out of a developmentally produced mind/brain structure forged from wounds experienced in early infancy but occurring in an environment of no other chaos and it is this which underpins porosity to psychic infections and the capacity to use them therapeutically. This new model offers a revolutionary way to understand shamanic wounded healers, how they should be selected and trained, how their wounds can be transformed and used in clinical work, ultimately challenging traditional therapist/client stereotypes
